Kiss and Tell (30 page)
Beccy didn’t think it was a moment to share the fact she was currently half way through the latest Marian Keyes, taking occasional breaks to flick through
OK!
magazine.
French literature does it for me too
, she replied happily. It wasn’t a lie. She’d loved reading Zola and Flaubert for her French A level;
Madame Bovary
had been a favourite, with the dashing, adulterous landowner Rodolphe Boulanger making her think of Hugo.
Read to me sometime, Tash. I want to hear your voice again.
Beccy shuddered, thinking about that first magical call. He had heard
her
voice, not Tash’s. So what if she’d softened and Sloanified
it a bit to sound like her stepsister; it was still Beccy who had spoken to him, who had flirted with him and heard that amazing gruff, sexy voice in return.
Inspired, she headed to Marlbury library on her afternoon off and borrowed a translation of
Cyrano de Bergerac
, but found it highly disappointing because she’d forgotten that stupid, noble Cyrano dies still denying his lifetime’s love.
She texted New Zealand afterwards:
x
A kiss?
A rosy circle drawn around the verb ‘to love’.
That blew it; she should never have quoted Rostand, least of all using the L word again. He didn’t reply for two days. Beccy started to panic, taking long, unscheduled breaks from yard work to drive up to the ridge beside the telephone mast where there was maximum reception and wait in vain for a response.
Then, to her eternal relief, he texted:
Tell me you love good food.
Beccy, whose appetite had never deserted her despite faddiness that had taken her from vegetarian to vegan to fruitarian at various points, texted back with a triumphant affirmative.
I can’t wait to cook for you. What’s your favourite food?
Better and better. For all her greed, Beccy was hopelessly basic in the kitchen.
Thai, North Indian, Lebanese, tapas
she replied ecstatically
. And best of all, stew with dumplings.
I will cook you stew
he promised.
That’s total ambrosia for a Kiwi
.
She laughed, daring herself to suggest
And rolypoly to follow?
Haven’t got a sweet tooth
, he revealed, not getting the innuendo.
Can’t stand jam. My dad’s favourite. Sticks in my throat
.
It was a silly detail, but Beccy’s heart soared. She had always hated jam intensely. It reminded her of those first years after her mother remarried, when Henrietta went into country-wife overdrive and made endless pots of conserves from every fruit in James’s vast garden. The smell of jam-making still made Beccy feel sick, associated as it was with the wretched misery of becoming a reluctant and unwanted stepdaughter.
Hate jam too. My stepfather’s favourite. Sticks in my throat. But I love stew.
I love stew too.
x
x
Those two kisses criss-crossed the world as the birds of a feather finally lay down to roost, knowing they had crossed another invisible boundary.
Can I call you?
he wrote the next time.
Any time
, she replied eagerly before remembering that she was Tash and ‘any time’ wasn’t an option for a married mother of two with a business to run.
When he did call she was lolling in bed just before midnight,
The Truth about Cats and Dogs
playing on her laptop, which she was finding considerably more cheering than Rostand.
‘Tash?’
‘Yes,’ she managed to splutter vaguely, heart hyper-charged.
‘Now, in this blessed darkness, I feel I am speaking to you for the first time.’
That sexy Kiwi drawl was unbelievably potent. Beccy reeled, her heart on fire. It was a quote from
Cyrano de Bergerac
, when he speaks to Roxane in the darkness beneath her balcony, pretending to be her suitor Christian but in reality confessing his own love.
He’d read the book!
‘I know Hugo’s in Holland tonight,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she managed another strangled affirmative. Hugo had indeed disappeared to the Netherlands first thing that morning to compete at Breda CIC, the one-day equivalent of the three-day CCI, catching a lift in an owner’s private plane so that he could ride and return home within just two days and not interrupt preparations for Burghley.
‘So you’re all alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Talk to me.’
For a moment, Beccy wanted to hang up so badly she couldn’t breathe. She suddenly thought about Tash and her children in the house a few hundred yards away, probably breastfeeding little Amery and listening to Radio Four in bed. Disgrace and embarrassment threatened to asphyxiate her.
‘I c-can’t talk,’ she managed to whisper.
‘Sorry. Dumb of me to call. Forget it.’
‘No. Please don’t go.’
She clung on to the phone for what seemed like for ever, hand shaking, heart battering her ribs, watching blindly as a muted
Uma Thurman and Ben Chaplin moved about on her laptop screen.
‘Okay, I have a question for you,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s nothing personal – well, not directly. It’s about my father.’
‘Yes.’
‘We haven’t spoken for a long time. Years, you know. We fell out.’
‘Go on.’
‘Now he knows I’m leaving he wants to meet up.’
‘That’s good.’
‘No it’s not. He’s a shit, I want nothing to do with him. He just wants money. He always does. But he’s used my mum to get at me.’
‘Oh.’
‘I can’t leave her here like this with him around.’
‘So you might not come here after all?’ she bleated, torn between relief and regret.
‘That’s what I’m asking, Tash.’
She almost wished he was talking to Tash right now. She was always good at advice and sympathy. Beccy just wanted to get back to
Cyrano de Bergerac
and flirting.
‘If you meet your dad and pay him off, will he leave your mum alone?’
‘I guess.’
‘So there’s your answer.’
There was a long pause and Beccy sensed that perhaps she’d said the wrong thing. In her head she could hear Tash’s soft husky voice urging ‘Bring your mum here with you, Lough’ or ‘Stay there and sort it out’. But Beccy, spoilt little rich girl, came up with ‘pay him off’. Nice one. She needed to rescue this fast.
‘I have a question for you,’ she said, grateful to have found her voice, that soft Tash voice she aped so well.
‘Okay.’
‘Are you really as ruthless as they say?’
‘Depends what they say.’
‘Don’t they call you the Devil on Horseback in New Zealand?’
‘Some do.’
She took a deep breath and crossed her fingers. ‘So why can’t the Devil on Horseback stand up to his own father and tell him to leave his mother alone?’
That was more like it, Beccy reasoned, feisty and direct with a
smoky touch of sensuality to her voice. She was back in business.
There was another long pause. On screen, Abby and Brian were having phone sex. Beccy sighed jealously.
‘You don’t know my
p
p,’ he said eventually. ‘He talks with his fists.’
‘Afraid of getting beaten up?’ she teased.
‘Yeah, quite frankly.’
‘Then perhaps you
should
think twice about coming here after all.’
‘You planning to beat me up, then?’ That amazing voice deepened with amusement and flirtation.
A slow smile spread across Beccy’s face as she realised she was back in the game and on familiar, flirty turf.
‘Not me. But there are a lot of jealous types around here, you know.’
‘Don’t I just. Reckon I’ll have to watch my back out there.’
‘Just your own?’
‘I’ll watch every part of you if you like.’
She was shivering with excitement now. Forget Abby and Brian, this was a million times more thrilling. Her nerve endings were so charged, she expected her duvet to combust. She couldn’t resist sliding her hand down between her legs.
‘I’ll hold you to that.’
‘I’ll just hold you.’
Oh. My. God. Beccy’s fingers encountered a warm geyser bubbling over a pip-hard little rock and as soon as she touched it she climaxed, shuddering quietly and shamefully into her pillow.
‘Still there?’ he asked after several seconds. ‘Afraid I might start a fight out there?’
Beccy suddenly didn’t want to flirt any more. ‘This is serious, Lough. Don’t you dare give me away here.’
‘I was under the impression your husband had already done that?’
It was a few moments before she could take in what he had said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing. Forget I said it.’
‘What are you talking about here?’ Her voice had risen from her breathy Tash impersonation towards her normal pitch. She didn’t care whether she was pretending to be Tash or not. She wanted to know.
‘Ask Hugo.’
Beccy carefully closed the lid of her laptop and balanced it on her bedside table, pulling her duvet up to her chin, causing Karma, who was asleep on the end of the bed, to fall off with a thud as she was rolled from her twelve-tog nest.
‘Still there?’ he asked again.
‘Yup.’
‘
A kiss is a message too intimate for the ear
,’ he began to quote, ‘
infinity captured in the bee’s brief visit to a flower, secular communication with an aftertaste of heaven, the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover’s lip:
“Forever”.’
Beccy closed her eyes, feeling the weighty lurches as Karma climbed aboard the bed to make herself comfortable once again.
‘I wanted to kiss you the first time I ever saw you competing in Melbourne.’
Beccy’s eyes snapped open again.
‘What was that?’
‘Melbourne three day event. I saw you compete.’
‘When?’
‘Six years ago. My first time there. The horse got a knock flying over and we didn’t declare. I was in the crowd on cross-country day. You were riding one of Sandy Hunter’s advanced horses. I watched you through the water – the mare was a famous hydrophobic, but you pretty much carried her through it. It was great riding. Then some nutty girl tried to throw herself in front of your horse, remember?’
Beccy closed her eyes. How could she forget?
‘Somebody stopped her,’ she remembered, the dizzying frenzy of that day more blurred in her mind than ever. Days on end with no food, living in a hostel in St Kilda with a Norwegian girl called Mjoll who she’d met on the Gold Coast, and who shared big blocks of crumbly brown dope and fed Beccy’s paranoia about her stepfamily. Knowing Tash was going to be in Melbourne with Hugo, longing to punish her for having what Beccy wanted, for driving her out into the wilderness in search of purpose.
‘I stopped her,’ Lough’s deep, gruff voice said simply.
‘You?’
‘Yeah. Small world, huh?’
‘Ohmygod.’
‘I came to meet you in person the next day – you were signing
books. But you didn’t recognise me and I got tongue-tied. You were feeling crook and Hugo was being mean, I remember that. I was a nobody then, just a small-town Kiwi vet with big ambitions. I’ve still got the book – you spelled my name wrong when I said “Lough as in Scottish loch.”’
Beccy was barely breathing. ‘And the girl?’
‘What girl?’
‘The girl who ran out in front of Ta—’ She corrected herself, panic rising. ‘In front of my horse. You saved her life. What happened to her?’
‘No idea – she ran off before security could get at her. Looked pretty spaced-out to me.’
‘Would you recognise her again?’
‘Yeah, sure. Scary eyes. And she had a pretty distinctive tattoo of a mermaid on her shoulder.’
Beccy fingered her shoulder and wriggled lower under the duvet.
‘I don’t think you should come after all.’
‘What?’
‘Sort things out with your father first.’ She rang off and switched off her phone, pulling the covers right over her head.
As soon as Hugo returned from the Netherlands he was on a quick turnaround to prepare for Burghley. He had barely a couple of hours spare to spend with his family, let alone oversee Rory trying out his new rides. The following day Cœur d’Or would travel to Lincolnshire with the veteran Duck Soup, now Hugo’s only Burghley ride, who was due to retire from international three day eventing after the trials. A television crew had come to shoot a feature on the famous old horse for the local news round-up. When Rory finally turned up in his battered car to sit on the horse he would ride at one of the world’s toughest events in less than a week, Hugo was mid interview. He broke off to greet his new work rider with a face like thunder, which wasn’t quite the start Rory had hoped for.